Archive for the ‘cowsarejustfood’ Tag

The man cowsarejustfood wrote some stuff about a little package of my chewy work I sent up there. Big up cows for taking the time and for really doing a ruminant’s job on the thing and telling me some stuff I don’t usually put into words in my head about my involuntary culture sector work. Be sure to check the comments section too for what “John” has to say. Call me paranoid (I am) but I’d only just linked that from my Facebook page when that popped up! It’s just grist on the grist though.

I’ll cut&paste the text below but check the link if you can because Cows put up some sound&vision bobbins to contextualise the mastications. At least two of those MP3s sound a bit gnarlier than they usually do this end but fuckit.

And the full line is:

It ain’t a plane, it’s a flying bomb
It ain’t a poof, it’s Elton John
It ain’t working, you and me
I can see it why can’t you see?

and it was dropped onto the brokenhearted 2008 tape-gore from a dictaphone tape recorded circa 1997, and to me that’s important, okay?

(pete) um: giraffe / bumskipper / the path of least resistance

um…

yeah. pete um. or just um. um… yeah.

ahem.

i know little of peter beyond his take on cw mccall’s convoy. consequential to not very much. other than maybe i’d like to hear him do a country album on those crumbling things he makes music with, on, to and over. he could y’know. given his preponderance for entertainment, words, absurdity and musical mulching.

things that share the liminal, dreamy, fractured narrative. so his ouvre, sorta like a scrapbook in a hundred pieces; the song as paragraph or as burroughsian flash fiction. the song as haiku or tanka. or the sedoka, the butcherly translated whirling head poem which seems real fucking apt. or katauta, the poem fragment. not to overfragrance just y’know give you the gist of where i’m coming from… eating too many skittles, too many smarties, watching at the wrong speed, listening half cut.

anyway it’s all veined with cartoon whimsy, english eccentricism, goofy humour. like if oliver postgate worked with the residents rather than vernon elliott. and bassoons, aye. his music’s so many things and none. master of no trades, jack of all.

gotta dig down otherwise all his shit’ll pass you by in a thirty second muttered blur. so swish away the foosty magnetic-tape-reek of open university cardigans, mustaches, dandruff; poke yr thumb through the rotten fruit soft skin to the sweet analogue meat beneath, to the pips and seeds that these digital triffids grow from. pips and seeds both physical and metaphysical. part man, part machine, part aetheric receiver.

giraffe’s the pop record. like some early/late period anticon release left to rot in the rain and warp in the sun. getting vibes of mutant cap’n beefheart’s sketches and phone jams, where van vliet’s never seen the desert or heard the blooze. instead, weaned on cheap cider, raised on fisher price r&b and shut-in electro he spunks out acoustocrunk for the ghosts in his head. s’all hiccuppy instrumentals, real and (re)imagined and singsong chatter. who are you talking to fella? who?

bumskipper (…) offers something more textured. crunchy and chewy like a toffee crisp. y’know the caramel and ricey bits smothered in sonic chocolate and unfidelity abstraction. these are more nonsongs, washed rinsed and faded till only nebulous radio muck remains, an a.m. transmitted effluence, lapsing into drunken gripes, chipmunk tunes, charity shop vinyl samples and modem noise. hearing the sound recordings from john carpenter’s prince of darkness but it ain’t satan’s return they warn of, it’s delia fucking derbyshire.

the path of least resistance is a messy inbetween (there’s that liminallity again…) at a mere twenty four tracks not quite as nano as giraffe. but does feature the stupid clever slo-mo skronk of river ayler. legible instrumental scrawls, bit of structure, bit of melody and the odd wonky couplet: it ain’t it a plane its a flying bomb, it ain’t a poof it’s elton john.

yup.

mumbling like a bargain books will self. where yr not exactly sure what he said, what kind of sense it makes (if chuffing any). hell even if you misheard it, go with it. make yr own fiction: i should ebay my tumbleweed (or) yr talking to me like yr pissing in a phonebox (or) jovian bowel shock… does it mean anything, contextually or otherwise? does it need to? and stumbling through the charming buffoonery you’ll hit something as wearilly succinct as:

it’s just an indication of the tired human spirit when everything sounds like a bad lyric

listening over sixty seven collaged audio midgets s’like he’s trepanning his skull and harvesting the electric-ecto-drip of too fucking many ideas. a production inversely proportionate to track length. none of which is meant in the pejorative. like, i suspect, the man hisself, a rum cove, it’s an occasionally baffling, willfully bewildering unreconstructed shuffle through the noise inside someone else’s head.

myspace / umbusiness

This entry was posted on 11/10/2010 at 9:50 pm and is filed under mp3, music i listen to, video with tags bumskipper, giraffe, music, music review, noise, pete um, the path of least resistance, um. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
2 Responses to “(pete) um: giraffe / bumskipper / the path of least resistance”

1.
John Says:
12/10/2010 at 11:31 am

I can’t help but think that both you, the critiquer, and he, the artist, have taken far too many mind-altering substances to find any kind of musical value in that terrible fucking noise. There may be a social narrative to his lyrics, but frankly I’d rather listen to a tuneful nazi child molester. Possibly the worst thing I have ver heard in my life
2.
marxsbeard Says:
12/10/2010 at 2:15 pm

heh… i have a certain admiration for people who take the time to slate something they’ve no interest in. so thanks for stopping by and commentating. do you have any recommendations from the tuneful nazi child molester micro genre?

in answer to yr query: whilst i can’t speak for pete, i was on the brown ale and ketamine while listening and writing.